In a rare move, the Supreme Court announced Thursday that it will hear oral arguments in May on President Donald Trump’s executive order addressing birthright citizenship, following an emergency request from the administration.
On his first day in office in January, Trump signed an executive order interpreting the 14th Amendment to mean that only children born to parents “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States are granted citizenship.
The order’s effect would be to deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born to individuals who are not legal residents, the Western Journal reported.
The 14th Amendment was adopted shortly after the Civil War to affirm that formerly enslaved individuals were citizens of both the United States and the states in which they lived.
In the years since, it has been broadly interpreted to grant automatic citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. However, the Supreme Court has never issued a definitive ruling on the scope of this interpretation. That said, in 1895, the Court held that children born to legal resident aliens are American citizens.
CBS News reported that after Trump issued his executive order in January, more than half a dozen lawsuits were filed in federal courts across the country, including in Washington, Maryland, and Massachusetts.
Lower courts blocked the order’s implementation, and federal appeals courts in San Francisco, Boston, and Richmond, Virginia, upheld these rulings.
“The Justice Department filed emergency appeals of the three decisions with the Supreme Court in mid-March and asked it to limit enforcement of the birthright citizenship order to 28 states and individuals who are not involved in the ongoing cases,” CBS News noted.
The nation’s highest court issued an order on Thursday scheduling oral arguments in the case for May 15. As The Hill noted, holding a hearing that late in the term—set to conclude in June—is an uncommon move.
During the presidential campaign, Trump said, “Constitutional scholars have shown for decades that granting automatic citizenship to the children of illegal aliens born in the United States is based on a patently incorrect interpretation of the 14th Amendment.”
“The framers of the 14th Amendment made clear that ‘persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers’ are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the U.S.,” he added.
Following the Supreme Court’s emergency decision, Trump told reporters at the White House: “I am so happy. I think the case has been so misunderstood.”
